This Is Brooklyn’s Most Absurd Real Estate Deal Yet

You know what would be hypothetically funny, but terrible if it ever actually happened? Say a developer spotted a beautiful historic building—let’s place it in Brooklyn Heights—made of five stories, 20 rental units and, in a moment of inspired insanity, said: Let’s take this property, kick out all its tenants, convert it into a single family mansion, and make money on it hand over goddamn fist. Let’s list it at… $22 million. See if anyone bites.

Curbed reports (from an initial piece in the Wall Street Journal) that the building on the corner of Orange and Hicks Streets—previously owned by Jehovah’s Witnesses, who are selling off their properties and hightailing it up state—was purchased by Manhattan-based Benchmark Real Estate Group in January for $13.5 million. Now they will take those cozy 20 apartments that housed—at minimum—twenty people, and obliterate them so that one family of four can do as nature, by which I mean opportunist developers, intended: have it all to themselves for almost twice the money they paid for it.

Inside this gigantic urban single-family dwelling, a future blessed familial unit will enjoy, in addition to just four bedrooms, a gym, a wine cellar, a roof terrace, and a double-height library with floor-to-ceiling shelves, according the Walls Street Journal.

According to StreetEasy, some tenants had signed leases in the building as late as August. Only now they are walking around, newly kicked out, and moving again before their lease is up. But that’s ok—the family who will take their place won’t have to think about that too much. They can distract themselves drinking one of their 800 bottles of wine from their personal wine cellar, or sink themselves into a wonderful book of fiction, placed lovingly on one of their floor-to-ceiling book shelves. Or, they could just look around at their real lives which will be even more absurd than actual fiction.